A nice little pre-war grouping from Barnet. A certain Mr Skinner had passed the examination to be an Air Raid Warden in October 1938 and also received alongside his certificate a card "AIR RAID WARDEN" display sign for his window.
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One for the re-enactors today, reproduction personalised Air Raid Wardens' Post metal wall signs. Well made A4-sized wall plaques, suitable for indoor or outdoors. Made from 0.7mm thick aluminium with a high gloss finish. You can add quite a long locality - I tried Borough of Lewisham, and that was OK (it's a max of 25 characters including spaces). The font is good for WW2. A nice item for your re-enacting display or for putting up indoors. And only £12.99 delivered in the UK.
Get your own Wardens' Post sign This sign measuring approx 33cm by 43cm recently cropped up on an auction site. With so many reproductions and out right forgeries on the market it's often difficult to determine the originality of items such as this. The maker "Franco Signs" is a well known manufacturer that was based on Oxford Street, W1 in London from the mid-1930s.
Below are two fake Air Raid Shelter signs currently up on eBay. The seller has dozens of shedmade wooden signs from all sorts of areas across Europe (British and German). He adds spurious details on provenance - usually about salvaging or rescuing the signage from a factory in such-and-such a year - all utter bollocks. I'm amazed anyone would fall for such blatant fakes but it appears he's regularly selling this garbage.
Here are the four common ARP plaques or wall signs that are regularly sold as originals. These light weight cast aluminium signs have been doing the rounds for many years now. One is particularly egregious having two crowns on it and another replicates the use of "ARP" twice. Some have been painted, some sanded and shined. A few even have spurious marks on the back in an attempt to prove originality. There are even a few examples in brass rather than aluminium. As far as I can tell there are no original photos showing any of these designs being used during the war. They often appear on eBay (from the same sellers...there's a clue to authenticity...) and have filtered through to auction houses and regularly crop up on militaria websites. Prices vary but usually they sell in mid twenties but have been known to go for a lot more.
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